Page 72 of Clive Cussler The Iron Storm
“Anytime now, I suppose.”
“All right, good. Soon as he’s here and we get the provisions aboard, move us over to the fueling bowser and top off the tanks. We’re heading to New York as fast as this old girl can carry us.”
The grizzled master looked like he’d been gut-punched. He thought he had another two weeks’ charter. “What’s the problem, Zane? Fish are still running and the price we’re getting per pound is practically paying for your charter.”
“It’s not that. It’s the battleship that sank the British destroyer and snuck on out of here this morning. This man is a Van Dorn detective who says they’re headed to New York in order to shell the city. They could potentially kill hundreds. Thousands, even.”
“The hell, you say.”
“Just make ready.”
“We could use an extra hand if you want us there quickly.”
“I can sail,” Bell told him.
Grimm scowled. “We aren’t day sailing out to P-town, Beacon Hill.”
“I’ve seen my share of nor’easters, Captain Grimm, and I’m not a man who can’t back up his boasts. I’ll be crew enough for you.”
Grimm’s eyes flicked over to his paying customer. “Zane, your charter, your call.”
Grey didn’t hesitate. “He’s a Van Dorn man. Most-trustworthy detectives in the country, by all measure. If Isaac says he can sail, I’ll take him at his word.”
Fifteen minutes later, theAlice N.’s mate, Caleb, arrived seated next to the driver of a one-horse flatbed wagon. He was about twenty-five, tall and lanky, with a chin so weak it was practically nonexistent. He wore a Boston Red Sox cap, in honor of their World Series win the year prior.
With all four men pitching in to unload crates of food, ice blocks, and gallon tins of fresh water, it took only minutes before the taciturn and unhelpful driver was off again. Grimm fired the fishing boat’s engine and ordered Caleb to cast off the lines. He spun the boat to head deeper into the marina in order to tie up next to the fuel pumping station. While they puttered across the water, and passed more fishing boats, Caleb, Bell, and Grey set about stowing all the provisions. The ice and perishables went into a cold storage locker installed under a hatch in the main salon’s floor. Grey and Caleb had a system for where everything went, so while they stocked shelves, Bell lugged it all in from the deck.
The fueling station consisted of a five-hundred-gallon tank set on a wooden frame several feet above a cement pier and a hand-operated suction pump. The tank had a narrow graduated-glasswindow to mark how many gallons had been pumped. A Portuguese boy of no more than twelve with a grubby Greek fisherman’s cap covering a mop of unruly hair worked the pump, his skinny arms showing remarkable stamina.
Grimm had a wooden stick he could push to the bottom of theAlice N.’s fuel tank to check its level. After thirty minutes, in which the kid’s pace never slackened, he was satisfied the tank was full. He paid the kid’s father, who’d sat on a chair and watched the whole process from under a slouch hat, with a hefty handful of silver coins from various nations’ mints.
A dozen small boats still puttered around the remains of theMastiff. She’d sunk lower into the harbor as more trapped air escaped from the deep reaches of her hull. Bell could see Lieutenant Awbrey, the ranking survivor, directing salvage teams trying to save anything they could before the ship fully sank to the bottom. Bell tried to catch his eye, but the Welshman never looked over.
As they motored past the coastal city’s seawall and into open water, Bell reflected that he couldn’t have done any better. Just six and a half hours had passed since Karl Rath had sunk theMastiffand stranded him in the Azores, and here he was, already in full pursuit.
Captain Grimm kept the motor running for the first couple of hours of the journey. The engine was small and so they barely cracked seven knots. Bell tried not to keep recalculating how much farther ahead theSaarlandsailed with each passing hour. It did him no good to agonize over it, but agonize he did.
As the sun dipped lower toward the horizon, the winds picked up. They worked as a team to hoist the main sail, followed soon by the jib out over the little boat’s prow, and finally a mizzen sail over her stern. The difference was immediate and dramatic. A bow wavecurled off the hull in a long-running V, while the ship heeled to port and accelerated to eleven knots at least.
“She’s quicker than you let on,” Bell said to Grey and Grimm as all three stood in the small enclosed cockpit under the mizzenmast.
“I think oldAliceis showing off for you, Bell,” Grimm said, still unconvinced that Bell was a sailor despite the ease he showed putting up the sails. “She’s at her top speed straight out of the gate like she’s giving her favors to a man in a hurry.”
Bell felt his first glimmer of hope.
37
Among all the works createdby man, no object greater personifies “form follows function” more than the modern battleship. Her function is to bring the largest and greatest number of guns to a naval engagement in order to defeat the enemy, and this alone determines every aspect of her form. Nothing about the design deviates from that. The hull is streamlined for efficiency not grace. Apart from some wood paneling in a few officers’ cabins and their wardroom, every surface is made of steel. The vessels are cold, industrial, brutalist, with little consideration given to the men who serve aboard, as they are effectively cogs in the great machine themselves.
TheSaarlandwas no different. She didn’t cut through the water, rather, her high bows tossed the ocean contemptuously aside as she raced across the Atlantic for her date with destiny. The seas weren’t particularly rough, but even then the battlewagon refused to roll with the swells. She was like an unmovable force of nature.
Standing on the bridge of theSaarland, Karl Rath had never felt so powerful in his life. They’d just executed his most audacious plan yet, and it had gone off without a hitch.
Escaping out of occupied Belgium had been easy. They knew all the established smuggling routes and all forty-five of them had made it to Rotterdam without incident. There waited a small steam freighter whose captain was sympathetic to the anarchist cause and vastly reduced his charter fee. They had sailed with the tide after the last of his men reached the port. The trip to the Azores had been uneventful. Rath used the time to further drill his men on how to operate theSaarlandonce they took her from her Brazilian minders.
Rath was in overall charge of the mission, but he lacked the experience to effectively run the ship herself. For that he had two former Italian naval officers, who’d been drummed out of the Navy for dereliction of duty. One had even spent six months in the brig before being dismissed. They were both bitter and resentful of their treatment and more than willing to be recruited into Rath’s gang. It was his chance meeting with them at a political rally in Switzerland that had given him the idea for this mission.
Under them were a motley assortment of men, some with naval or artillery training thanks to the ongoing war, of which most had deserted. There were Germans, a few more Italians, Eastern Europeans like Rath himself, even a couple of radicalized Frenchmen who were more communist than anarchist, but were willing to sign on.
